One of the things that I inherited when I joined my current company was BT as our Hosted Exchange provider. The performance of this service has been poor to date but particularly poor over the last few months. At the time of writing this we have been without email access for the majority of the day. To add insult to injury the BT support website reports the issue as being resolved when it clearly isn’t. We will be swapping email providers in the new year.

We have just announced we have secured £1.3 million in investment from private equity group ePlanet.

House Of Fraser have started accepting PayPal on their website. House Of Fraser is taking advantage of the new PayPal support in the eCommera CoreCommerce platform.

Magasin recently went live on the eCommera CoreCommerce platform just in time for the Christmas period. Well done to all involved!

I have been in Las Vegas this week at Shop.org. There appeared to be more vendors and attendees than last year which is surprising given the economic climate. Just proves ecommerce is a good investment in a downturn. It has also been a useful visit to catch up with our partners face to face, e.g. Demandware, Coremetrics, etc. and talk about strategies. I am now about to board my flight home.

Myself and the rest of the management team have been working hard this year to secure a second round of funding. More details can be found here.

We have just completed upgrading all eCommera retailers to Demandware 2.10. Demandware 2.10 is a major upgrade and includes powerful new Searchandising functionality.

Using Demandware 2.10 our retailers are able to specify sort orders at any level within the category hierarchy, e.g. Sort the following category, Mens > Clothing > Underwear, by blend of, Date Added (desc, 10%), Stock (desc, 10%), Sales Velocity (desc, 10%), Margin (desc, 20%), Relevancy (desc, 50%). This functionality increases the efficiency of merchandisers and should increase revenues.

Additionally retailers are now able to define Dynamic Customer Segments and therefore display different promotional content to different customer segments, e.g. display DVD player promotion to customers who have bought a TV in the last 60 days.

These are just two examples of the powerful new functionality available in the eCommera CoreCommerce platform.

We are in the process of adding Coremetrics Intelligent Offer integration to the eCommera CoreCommerce platform. My team are working on this and we hope the Coremetrics Intelligent Offer integration will be available to our retailers in Oct 2009. Coremetrics Intelligent Offer provides intelligent Dynamic Recommendations functionality, e.g. People who bought this also bought these, cross sell and upsell. This functionality not only increases revenues but improves the efficiencies of merchandisers. Coremetrics Intelligent Offer competes with, Baynote, RichRelevance, etc.
The eCommera CoreCommerce platform already includes support for Coremetrics Web Analytics, Coremetrics Explore, Coremetrics LIVEmail, Coremetrics SitePromotion and Coremetrics Image Tagging.

I am pleased to announce that we are in the process of adding PayPal integration to the eCommera CoreCommerce platform. My team are hard at work on this and we hope the PayPal integration will be available to our retailers in Oct 2009.

The eCommera CoreCommerce platform currently supports the following payment / fraud integrations, DataCash, PPT, PBS / Auriga and The Third Man.

I am in Helsinki, Finland today for the kick off meeting for one of our new retailers. This will be a true multi-language (11 languages initially) and multi-currency (3 currencies initially) website. The website will also have B2B functionality in addition to B2C.

My team are also very close to launching our first website in Denmark just in time for Christmas trading.